They had five children, but only a daughter, Anna, survived. In , they met for the first time, in Switzerland. Chief of these was the estate and her daughter Anna's inheritance, both of which might be threatened if she married him. Anna married a Polish count, easing some of the pressure. In they finally married, and moved to Paris, but he died six months later. Though she never remarried, she took several lovers, and died in Petersburg , and elsewhere, he chose as his primary residence the village of Pohrebyszcze in the region of Vinnytsia.
Most estimates range between and Their marriage was a union of wealthy families, not of passion. His estate covered 21, acres 85 km 2 and owned over 3, serfs, including domestic servants.
The manor had been designed by a French architect, and its owner filled it with luxuries from around the world: paintings from galleries in Milan and London, dinnerware from China, and a library of 25, books in a variety of languages. He spent most of the day supervising the grounds, by some accounts with an iron fist. As one biographer put it: "He loved Eve but he was not deeply in love with her. The estate at Wierzchownia was isolated.
Petersburg, and even more bored by noble guests in her own home. She found nothing in common with the ladies of high society, and longed for the stimulating discussions she had enjoyed with her brother Henryk. She spent her time reading the books her husband imported from faraway lands. After laboring in pseudonymous obscurity for ten years, Balzac published Les Chouans The Chouans in A tale of star-crossed love amidst a royalist uprising in Brittany , it was the first work to which he signed his own name.
She also enjoyed Balzac's Physiologie du mariage The Physiology of Marriage , also published in , which heaps satirical scorn on husbands and celebrates the virtue of married women. She felt that Balzac had lost the reverence shown in his earlier works, and worried that he had based Foedora on a real woman from his life. Motivated partly by concern, partly by boredom, and partly by a desire to influence the life of a great writer as her sister Karolina had done , she wrote to Balzac.
